Sunday, November 09, 2008

All Gone

The boys and I have the house to ourselves again. My parents are gone, taking off in fine style in first class on the TGV to Lille.

I believe it might well be the last time my dotty dad visits. I'm not sure my mother could take another trip with him, dotty as he is and bound to get worse. We will be going over at New Year and I do wonder how he'll be by then.

As a complete change of scene, I took the boys to the cinema to see 'Quantam of Solace'. I love Daniel Craig as James Bond - he's so craggy and professionally tough. I think I preferred his first Bond film, 'Casino Royale', but I really enjoyed the cinema experience of seeing QoS in all its surround sound booming effects and picture quality.

It was a tad all about killing the baddies and the fallout was pretty impressive, but he did get the answers he wanted and basically the baddies deserved to die anyway.

My eldest has taken possession of his bedroom again, to his relief, and we should be back to normal pretty soon. Having visitors makes me realise just how small my house really is. Amplified, of course, when one of them is dotty because he takes up a disproportionate amount of time and attention, clearing up crises, managing just his daily life. It's totally exhausing.

My mother has all my admiration and I'm just glad I could help her out for a week of fun, socialising and dealing with dotty dad. Isolation seems to be a key issue with carers, making caring even tougher than it already is. Havering (where my folks live) council seem to be doing their best to exacerbate the problem by closing day care centres and carehomes left right and centre, whilst paying themselves handsome salaries and taking care of their own. Funny that...

The ostrich approach can only work for so long, however. I don't know when reality will hit, but when it does, I just hope it takes all the dickheads blind to the problems of Alzheimer's with it. One thing is for sure, it's a problem that's not going to go away, so they'd do better facing up to it and making provision for those that need help rather than waiting so long that they have to call in crisis management specialists and be bailed out by the Government.

I have a message for them: Get Off Your Arses, and Spend Some Money, You TWATS. Think that'll work??